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I'll try to keep it short and simple.

Story: 2/10.
The main antagonist Kamui's motives are never very interesting, and seeing as how that's the whole thing moving the story that is a huge problem. Not to mention that the ending makes the whole plot irrelevant. I can't go into more detail without spoiling it, but if Sibyl had just done some upkeep on itself and taken out the trash, Kamui would have never done any of the things he did. Sibyl is horrifically stupid in this series, reduced from a morally ambiguous but effective system in S1 to an evil and dumb-as-shit system ... in S2. There is nothing to care about except Akane, but we'll get to that in the Character section.

Art: 4/10.
Passable at best. While it never had the QUALITY art some of the later episodes of S1 had, it just felt uninspired. The cinematography was lacking and there was no decent animation of note whatsoever, save the OP. TatsuPro is clearly an inferior studio to I.G. in this department.

Sound: 4/10.
The OP is really great if you can enjoy that style of music. Great visuals and a fitting song to boot. And there's this one scene where opera music is playing and it's ridiculous how seriously the show's taking itself. But that's about it. There aren't any memorable tracks from the OST. At very best they just blend into the background. I guess the ED is okay too.

Character: 2/10.
Ginoza is listed as a "main character" on MAL's database here. What a joke. He has been neutered so much and matters so little to the story at all that they might as well have killed him off in episode 1 for some shock value. So Ginoza's bland, okay, that doesn't ruin the whole series. But when your main antagonist is also bland and boring that is problematic. In fact, there is not a single interesting character in this entire show except Akane. But Akane is not developed or played with in an interesting way, she's just likable because we got to know her in S1 and they didn't screw her up too badly. If the best thing you have to say about any one of a show's characters is "they maintained her status quo", then that's not great.

Enjoyment: 5/10.
At least it wasn't boring enough I wanted to turn it off. But I'm biased because I really like futuristic settings.

Overall: 4/10.
If the plot's crap and the characters are crap and the art's crap and the sound's crap there's not much left to watch for. If you want to watch the movie when it comes out (which is being done by Production I.G. and written by Urobuchi, unlike this garbage!) then just read a summary of this online to save your time. Not much even happened so you'll be fine.

Digital Juice is a collection of terrible shorts that are largely not worth your time even despite their short length. Only two of the six are even worth mentioning, so I'll cover them right now.

The first is In the Evening of a Moonlit Night. It's the only good one, thus my 2/10 rating - only 1/6 of the shorts are worth watching, thus 1.67/10 rounded up to being a 2/10. It's a neat music video about a girl with a deformed chin and fingers for toes - in other words, pretty neat. Go watch it here and don't bother downloading ... the rest of the garbage shorts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5l2M5K5yk9s

The second is Chicken's Insurance. Chicken's Insurance, much like the other four bad ones, is a piece of shit. But it's worth mentioning because of the song playing in the background. It's some mediocre hip-hop song with poor vocal delivery. But I noticed one line in it - "come on, girl, let me rock your world". Right away this stood out at me as a line from the song "Iwatodai Dormitory" from Persona 3. But surely it's a coincidence, right? That sort of sounds sort of like a generic rap lyric, it's probably nothing. But then, one second later, I hear "triple brown, triple brown, triple brown meow". This is a lyric right from the song "Joy" from Persona 3. Here's proof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrL5hTIbQ7o#t=40

This clearly isn't a coincidence. At first, I thought Digital Juice had just lifted lyrics from Persona 3, but then I checked and the game came out in 2006, while this collection of shorts was released in 2002. What's going on here? I decided to investigate. After scraping about on the SMT wiki for a bit, I found out that one of the rappers that provided vocals for the Persona 3 OST was named "Lotus Juice". "Lotus Juice"? "Digital Juice"? There's something going on. It doesn't take a detective to see a connection here. But further research turned up nothing. There was no discernible link between Lotus Juice and Digital Juice, or even Studio 4C or any of its employees. Google came up dry. It seems that my search has come to an end.

What is the link here? Was Lotus Juice on staff providing vocals for Digital Juice, possibly even being such an influence to Studio 4C staff that the collection of shorts was partially named after him? Could it be that it's just a coincidence, and Shoji Meguro, Persona 3's OST composer, just happened to watch Digital Juice and lifted the lyrics from this random background music for some reason? Or maybe it's something I haven't even thought of yet. What really happened? The world may never know. If you ever find any information about this bizarre occurrence, please leave a comment on my profile so I can get some closure to this mystery.

But ultimately, what I'm getting at is this: if the fact that Persona 3 lyrics are in a short section of this short collection is by far the most interesting thing about it, it's probably because it's shit. Because it is. Don't bother watching this.

C³-bu, in a word, is confused. It doesn't know what it wants to be. Is it a slice-of-life about cute girls shooting cute guns? Is it a story about how the main character loses sight of what's really important while chasing a dream and how she works to gain it back? Is it a tale of the supernatural link that a girl has with an ancient Japanese warrior and how she uses her power to change the world? The answer is none of the above. It is instead a jumbled mishmash of all three. Due to their radically ... different themes they end up coming together like chocolate, steak, and curry in a blender.

The slice-of-life episodes have little to comment on. If you like cute girls and/or airsoft then watch them, they're well-done for what they are.

The supernatural element has only one major episode, number 4. It's brought up again twice near the end but never mentioned throughout the large majority of the series. The fact that they included the paranormal theme at all is mind-boggling. When they brought it up in episode 4, the watcher is led to believe that it will be the focus of the show. Yet it in fact makes absolutely no impact on the plot whatsoever. However, it's still done beautifully, and is in my opinion the best episode of the show.

The plot-driven episodes are quite good. Yura and Sonora (and to a lesser extent Rento and Rin) get some character development, and although the other characters are just there to fill out the cast and are underdeveloped it doesn't detract much from the plot progression. Although its end is less than fantastic they're worth a watch.

You may read this and think "This all sounds pretty good!" Well, that's because it is. Each individual element is good but they don't mix together very well. You may be wondering why all of these differing ambitions seem at odds with each other in the show. (Note: the following is speculation.) This rampant disorganization is likely due to C³-bu being Kawajiri Masayoshi's directorial debut. With no offense meant to the man, his filmography outside of C³-bu consists of only one lone entry - doing background art for Dantalian. However, the individual episode directors all have more experience than Kawajiri. Many have worked on very notable shows like Cowboy Bebop, Code Geass, Gurren Lagann, etc. etc. As his first time directing a series, especially with little other experience under his belt, one can see how he might have had trouble keeping reins on the episode directors and making it so that the whole series has overarching themes rather than just having them crop up and then disappearing.

As I see it, there are four ways to watch C³-bu.

1. Watch episodes 1-3, 5-6, and 12-13 for SoL with girls and airsoft.
2. Watch episodes 7-11 if you're more into plot and want a decent story of suffering and redemption.
3. Watch all of episode 4 and 17:00 to 20:35 of episode 11 if you want an interesting supernatural oneshot.
4. Watch everything from episode 1 to 13 if options 1, 2, and 3 all sound appealing. You can watch it for the entertainment value and appreciate it for what it is - a highly flawed show that was poorly directed, but has some legitimately good material despite its shortcomings.